Weddings
The wedding photo slideshow the room actually wants to watch
There is a laptop at the back of the room, and whoever is standing beside it decides what two hundred guests see between the salad and the cake. That is the decision a wedding photo slideshow really is.
Two people do the work of a wedding slideshow in most rooms. One of them is standing at the laptop, usually a parent who volunteered in March and has been holding a folder of photographs since. The other is the caterer's staff, who have been politely asking since the soup whether the television behind them should be switched on. Neither of them knows what you wanted, and by the time the speeches start you will have stopped looking at it. A wedding photo slideshow is not a design problem. It is a handover problem, and the fix is a screen that runs on photographs which arrived by themselves, from the guests sitting at the tables, with nobody needed in the middle.
Two wedding slideshows, and only one of them is this
The word slideshow covers two quite different pieces of your day, and confusing them is how couples end up with a five-minute prepared film nobody asked for. The first is the one you build: selected engagement frames, a childhood photograph, perhaps a tribute, run at a fixed moment in the evening by somebody who sat down and edited it. It is a presentation, and this page is not about it. The second runs all evening. It plays on the wall behind the band or beside the bar, it is made entirely of photographs your guests took, and it does not stop for applause because nobody is standing at it. That second slideshow is what a collection does on a token-gated address, and it is the one that changes a room, because the room is watching itself. A hundred and fifty guests with phones out at the arrival, the ceremony and the first dance is a larger and more varied set of pictures than any one person could assemble, and the couple gets to see the parts of their own day that they were inside rather than standing next to.
Who stands at the laptop
The parent who volunteered
Enthusiastic at six, unavailable by eight. They are the reason the cake photographs never appear, because they went to find the cake. If this is your person, choose one seated near the machine, and write the instructions down in one line so they can hand over the job when they get called away.
The best man or the maid of honour
Sharp in the afternoon, and not to be trusted with a screen once the toasts have started. They also have a speech to write and a room to hold. Give them the guest link and the task of telling their table to scan it, which they will do brilliantly, and keep the machine away from them.
A teenage relative who is good with machines
The most capable person in the building and the least interested. Perfect for the twenty minutes of setting up, and they will not stay to watch a wall. Use them for the connection and the display settings, then let the slideshow run without an operator.
The venue's own staff
Competent, busy, and responsible for the whole building. They will switch your slideshow on and will not police it. That is the arrangement most rooms should want: the screen runs, nobody is in charge of the screen, and everything on it was a photograph you had already accepted.
Nobody
The option nobody expects. Because the slideshow plays the collection from a link rather than from a playlist, the room can be left to watch it with no operator at all. Your job then reduces to two decisions made in advance: which template, and whether anything arriving has to be approved before it appears.
- The slideshow address, written down somewhere that is not your phone, because your phone will be in a different room by the time it is needed.
- A browser tab opened on that address and set to full screen before guests walk in, so the room's first impression is photographs rather than a desktop.
- Display sleep switched off and the laptop plugged in, with the volume left exactly where the room's own music needs it.
- An agreed decision about approval, made in the week before rather than in the corridor at half past seven.
- One named person told where the lead is, and one named person told what to do if a photograph appears that should not.
- A printed stand on every table, because a screen with nothing arriving is a screen that has already been switched off by somebody.
Hand the venue the screen address rather than your login. It is a separate, token-gated link, and it is the reason a coordinator can be trusted with the wall without being trusted with the collection.
What the couple wants to see during dinner
- The arrival and the drinks
- This is the material nobody photographs on purpose and everybody photographs by accident. It is also the hour your hired photographer is least likely to have covered, because they were inside setting up. Guests standing at the bar with a drink in each hand are the record of it.
- The ceremony from the back rows
- Six people shooting the same aisle gives you six angles of one moment, and the frame you want is usually the one nobody else stood in. Somebody three rows back caught your grandmother's face, and the photographer was at the front and could not have.
- The table details somebody spent a month on
- The place cards, the favours, the table numbering you argued about, the napkin rings. The florist will ask for these photographs in the week after, and guests took forty of them without thinking, which is why the screen is worth glancing at long enough to notice.
- The guests who came a long way
- The cluster of cousins by the window, the neighbour who drove three hours, the friends who arrived together and stood in a group all evening. You will not reach every table between the courses, and the pictures the room took of one another are how you find out who turned up.
- Whatever the first dance looked like from row nine
- A photographer's frame is composed. A guest's frame is the wobbly, vertical, laughing version, and it is often the one that tells you what the evening actually felt like. Keep both; they are not competing photographs of the same thing.
The photographs that must never reach a wedding screen
The frames that go badly wrong on a wedding screen are rarely dramatic ones. They are accidental: the inside of somebody's nose, a guest mid-argument, a photograph of a plate, an ex-partner in the background of a group shot from 1998 that somebody sent as a joke. There is a second category that is harder to plan for and easier to regret, which is children. Wedding guests photograph children constantly and send the results without a thought, and a couple who would never dream of putting a strange child's face on a wall has to decide that in advance rather than discover it at nine o'clock. Approval covers all of it. It lets you be the person who looks instead of the person who apologises afterwards, and looking takes two minutes on a phone between the starter and the fish.
A projector makes every decision public, so make the decision first
With approval off, there is no moment at which you choose what the room sees: a submission arrives and goes straight into the gallery and onto the wall. The couples who regret that do so loudly and too late, usually because of one photograph rather than a pattern of them. Turn approval on, and the screen plays only accepted files, which means the only thing you have to do on the night is look at a list twice.
How approval worksWhat the venue needs from you, in one line
A coordinator runs forty events a week and cannot remember yours, so give them one written line rather than a briefing: the screen at the back of the room plays photographs from the tables, this is the address, and nobody has to touch it. Hand over the link for the wall and keep the guests' upload address to yourself, because the first reaches nothing beyond the display while the second is how the room puts files into your hands. Everything else, including the display settings and the fact that the laptop is not a shared machine, belongs to whoever brought it.
The minutes when the wall should stop
The speeches
A toast is watched by the room rather than by the wall, and a projector full of moving photographs behind a best man is something he has to compete with. Change the input, or close the lid, and let two hundred people look at a person instead.
The first dance
The lights go down and the photographer starts working, which is the moment the couple has paid to be looked at. Nothing about the collection suffers if the wall is dark for four minutes, and the photographs of the dance arrive in it anyway within the hour.
The cake
Nobody glances at a screen while candles are being lit, and the collection fills faster at that minute than at any other point in the evening. Being in the room your venue is hosting is worth more than a wall that keeps moving behind you.
Photographs of the wall, and what they mean
There is a reliable signal that a wedding screen is working, and it is not the room watching it. It is the room photographing it. Somebody aims their phone at the projector because they found their own picture six feet tall and want to keep it, and the submissions that follow that moment often double what the previous hour produced. Look for it during the drinks. If nobody is doing it, the problem is almost never the layout you chose: it is that the room has not been told the code on the table is how a photograph gets up there.
When the wedding collection arrives late
A wedding does not finish when the last dance ends. The relatives who drove home send on the Sunday, the two friends who photographed everything send one enormous set having never looked at a code during the day itself, and the guest who left early uploads from a hotel the following morning. The address keeps playing all of it while the collection stays open, which is one more reason to take the archive once and late, rather than in a panic with the cake still in the fridge.
What a wedding wall is really for
The photographs a couple never sees are the ones taken of them by people who were not working.
Which slideshow template should a wedding use?
There are twelve, and a slideshow plays on one of them: Cinematic Film, Editorial Magazine, Polaroid Memories, Immersive Gallery, Dynamic Mosaic, Minimalist Motion, Story Chapters, Celebration in Motion, Spiral Vortex, Storybook Album, 3D Curved Carousel and Photos in Depth. A large, lively room usually needs the busier layouts because the collection gets big; forty good frames read better on the quieter ones.
Is the slideshow included in the wedding plan?
It is included on Celebrate and Keepsake. On Gather, the $19 tier, it is a one-off add-on of $9 for that event, and the free collection takes the same one-off rather than bundling anything. Either way it is worth knowing before you plan a wedding around a screen you have not yet bought.
How many photographs will the screen have to play?
Whatever the room sends. Gather holds 200 photographs and 30 videos, Celebrate 750 and 100, Keepsake 2,000 and 300. A wedding of a hundred and fifty guests with a stand on every table is usually a Celebrate collection, and the reason is the file count rather than anything else.
Can my planner or photographer use the same collection?
The guest link belongs to the collection, so anything the room sends is available to everybody you give an address to. Plenty of couples send the slideshow address to the venue and the guest link to the planner, then take one download of the archive at the end.
Who keeps the slideshow running after the reception?
Nobody. The address plays the collection, and the collection keeps filling for as long as it is open, which is why the guests who left early still end up on the wall at the following weekend.
Do guests see one another's photographs before I have looked?
Only if approval is off. With approval on, nothing plays that you have not accepted. The guest gallery is a separate switch as well, so you can let people upload without letting them browse, and still show the room a screen.
What happens to all of this when the year is up?
A Celebrate collection stays online for twelve months from its event date and a Keepsake for twenty-four, with warning mail beforehand. Download the archive and the photographs are ordinary files in your own library, at full quality on both of those tiers.
Give the screen something worth watching
Open the collection before the invitations go out, print four stands to a sheet, and decide now whether the wall waits for your approval. Then nobody has to stand at a laptop.
Slideshows and room displays
Put one link on the tables and let everyone contribute.
Create a collection, print the table stands, and the photographs your guests took are waiting for you the morning after. Guests never install anything and never make an account.